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China is eating the world

• haozes 1y ago
  As a Chinese person, I feel that the term "communism" is somewhat demonized in the West. In reality, not many people in China believe in it either. It might be similar to Christianity; I believe there aren’t too many people in Europe and the U.S. who genuinely adhere to it. I'm not entirely sure if it's the same kind of logic. Recently, I was watching a documentary about World War II (made by Americans) and was shocked by how severe the casualties were in the war between Germany and the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, in contrast to the Western Front. Ideology seems to be a primary culprit in that tragedy. I also watched a documentary about the Vietnam War (also made by Americans) and couldn't understand why the U.S. engaged in that war, sacrificing so many lives simply out of fear of the vague notion of communism. Decades later, we can see that not much happened as a result of that fear. Most of the time, I feel that people are not so different from one another. There may be slight variations in thought, but those differences are minuscule. I completely don’t understand why U.S.-China relations have worsened in recent years; it seems very absurd to me. All the mutual hatred stemming from ideological differences is just nonsense, similar to the animosity that exists between different religions—it's all nonsense.
• skeptrune 1y ago
  Sounds good, but reads surface level to me. I'd be interested to see something with more detail and citations. Or maybe even a rebuttal piece.
  • B1FF_PSUVM 1y ago
    Perhaps a pretty picture to tide you over while waiting for your requirements to be met? https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-top-countries-by-annual-electricity-production-1985-2024/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-top-countries-by-ann...
  • zemvpferreira 1y ago
    Better yet is to book a plane ticket. I haven’t been in China since ~2015 and already back then it felt inevitably advanced. I’m hoping to go back soon to see the future.
  • drake99 1y ago
    China has a 240-hour visa-free transit policy for foreigners. Most major cities have direct flights—come and see China! (Remember to download Alipay in advance and link your Visa card.)
    • skeptrune 1y ago
      I should! It sounds like it would be an amazing and eye opening experience.
    • mysterypie 1y ago
      Do you still get fingerprinted under the visa-free transit policy for foreigners? I can accept a facial scan, but I draw the line at fingerprints and more invasive biometrics.
      • drake99 1y ago
        https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/12/2025-03944/alien-registration-form-and-evidence-of-registration https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/03/12/2025-03...
      • jama211 1y ago
        Weird hill to die on imo but even Japan does fingerprints, it’s not that weird
      • netsharc 1y ago
        I went to China in 2019, and they scanned my iris... yeah... At an airport, there was a sign that said "Stand in front of the camera and we'll tell you the way to your gate.". It scanned my face, and on the screen it showed me my name (I guess to make sure it's the correct person), my gate, and how to walk there. I never consented to this commercial use...
        • vessenes 1y ago
          That's almost certainly available in a public database in China, FYI. I got to speak at a cool event in Shenzhen in 2019 and the gates automatically face (and maybe iris?) recognized for entry -- I never 'got scanned' consciously, but they worked great first try.
  • WaxProlix 1y ago
    China poured more concrete in 2023-2025 than the US has throughout its entire history. China creates and consumes an order of magnitude more energy, and in an increasingly sustainable and cost-effective manner. China has largely moved towards internal market sufficiency, with internal demand outstripping external imports. I'd be interested in a rebuttal piece too, because I don't necessarily want reality to be what it is. But it is, and it is.
    • _Algernon_ 1y ago
      How much of that concrete was poured into ghost cities?
      • neptuneskeptic 1y ago
        Name a ghost city
        • dr-detroit 1y ago
          [dead]
      • bryanlarsen 1y ago
        Building in advance of demand is something the US should do a lot more of. Find a >10 year old story about a Chinese ghost city, then Google current population. It'll be full.
        • RandomBacon 1y ago
          Where I live, they build a four-lane highway, then immediately after completing it, they start renovations on the same highway to expand it into a six-lane highway. While the U.S. has Eminent Domain, although China's version seems to be more impactful (displacing 1.3 million people for the Three Gorges Dam).
          • Fricken 1y ago
  • bigcat12345678 1y ago
    Surface level? What are depths you look? Are you not familiar with China's relentless obsession with education and excellence? The cutthroat competition in business, the insane persistence in long-term planning and execution, the vast land of rich treasure underground, the emoumous long history of singular view of history and ancestry? All these are traits of greatness. And they have the brutal struggle from external invasion and internal turmoil since 1800s, those hard time breed generations of strong man, men who not only endure physical hardership, intellectual struggles, and spiritual torment, they embrace it, treat them as enjoyable and rewarding. They not only are instant in action, they are also ruthless in reflection. They dire to challenge the strongest coalition of power when they were just gained independence, they are also totally ok to subdue to the same super power when they decide so, without much of a mental conflicting, while still maintaining a unwavering commitment to greatness beyond anyone else's imagination. China is bound to be the overlord of the nations on earth. That or it vanquish itself in its pursuit of that destiny. What else do you need to know?
• dingnuts 1y ago
  why is there always pro-China messaging here and on Reddit? Every day there's another story about how China is eclipsing the West, but wake me up when the CCP changes. China might be eating the world but the most obvious thing is the astroturfing.
  • bronson 1y ago
    To eat the world, first you must eat social media.
  • potsandpans 1y ago
    You're so used to the US and western world consent factories that even the suggestion of China doing well in an area has you on alert.
  • chvid 1y ago
    The zeitgeist is changing - public opinion is turning China friendly - Trump probably has a lot more to do with it than China itself.
  • fernvenue 1y ago
    Good one, and I remember that somewhere (maybe Hacker News) I saw an article said that China is spending so much money and people to do these things, build some websites and make articles to change some "views".
  • DarkNova6 1y ago
    Looking at what is going on in the US and how Trump is halfway there creating his own paramilitary force, China looks like a beacon of stability and progress.
  • panarchy 1y ago
    Probably because when I glance at pictures of cities in China I see amazing architecture and urban design that isn't rivaled by anything I see in the US. And when I glance at pictures of cities in the US I see fascist armed goons terrorizing people and crumbling infrastructure
• glimshe 1y ago
  There is a certain group of people who love this narrative/propaganda for political reasons. I'm tired of it irrespective of whether it is true. I'm ready to say "China is the greatest superpower ever and so much better than my US" so we can move on from this type of article.
  • churchill 1y ago
    You can simply ignore it, but you can't wish China and the progress they've made out of existence. There are also Europeans who feel uncomfortable with the US having 1.5* Europe's GDP with less than half the population. It's an extant truth and it'll become even more blatant as many Western countries struggle to do basic stuff like build out infrastructure.
    • vladms 1y ago
      Generally true, although population ratio seem a bit off (EU population is 75% of USA population and USA GDP is 1.5 of GDP EU). But GDP is not the only thing that matters. I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP. Also, worth mentioning EU has a lot of countries that grew a lot because there were so far behind (the ex-communist ones) which means it was playing "catch-up". There are advantages to not having lately a war on your territory (USA)...
      • riku_iki 1y ago
        > I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP. GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future.
        • wing-_-nuts 1y ago
          >GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future. Europe has been ahead of US on quality of life scores for decades, and has had lower gdp numbers the entire time. The man who invented GDP argued vigorously that it's a synthetic economic metric, and it shouldn't be used as a goal or measure of well-being, yet we insist on it because it's one of the few measures where the US is handily winning.
• churchill 1y ago
  Funny how much stuff you can build when you're not spending insane amounts of money bombing farmers in the Hindu Kush, achieving full-spectrum dominance over everyone, or catering to entrenched interests. Brown University's Costs of War project estimated that by 2021, all post-9/11 wars had cost $8T. When you factor in inflation since then, it easily exceeds $10T spent murdering farmers making $2/day in the Middle East. With nothing to show for it. That's roughly a third of America's GDP/current debt wasted on making the world a measurably worse place.
  • DarkNova6 1y ago
    Or when all the money goes to the 1% in a bottom-up scheme.
  • manoDev 1y ago
    China's population is 4.2x larger than the US. If they concentrate in developing their own country and creating an internal market, they'll do well. Meanwhile, US development strategy post-WW has been 100% based on projecting military [1], political [2] and economic [3] power on a global scale. So war isn't just "spending", but trading off investment on your own country vs. extracting value from somewhere else. That's how you get large defense funding but not public health care. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-known-u-s-military-base-overseas/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-known-u-s-mili... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
  • Gunax 1y ago
    8T isnt really that much for America, especially over 24 years. And it's not like China does not spend on defense. I would be cautious applying broad statements and simple causes. Often we take these opportunities to connect it with whatever pet issue we individually care about. That's why you can see people blaming everything from zoning policies to DEI.
    • AngryData 1y ago
• xixixao 1y ago
  What worries me more than “authoritarian model works”, is the isolation. Absolutely seriously: What enabled the terrors of collonialism was the lack of understanding of shared humanity between the sides. What happens when China is big, strong, different, ultra-nationalist and some factor kicks it out of the “peace is the most advantageous path forward” mode? Imagine the military and economic dominance of US, but with Chinese superiority ideals instead of liberal-democratic ones (and even with those plenty of harm has been caused).
  • coliveira 1y ago
    I don't worry about this even for a single minute, because the other scenario is much worse and more probable, i.e., "liberal-democratic" turn into fascism (something that already happened) and scale to a world-war for domination of "non-civilized" countries.
  • bigcat12345678 1y ago
    [flagged]
• thefz 1y ago
  > No Starbucks, no McDonald's, no Western chains at all. You'd be surprised by how much the rest of the world does not care about these things at all or even finds their presence degrading
  • aaomidi 1y ago
    This is one of the biggest things I miss from Iran.
  • chvid 1y ago
    There are plenty of Starbucks and McDonald’s in China.
  • Avalaxy 1y ago
    I would love to NOT have those chains in my country. Especially mac donalds, I associate with trash. Both trashy people, as well as literal trash laying on the streets.
  • vunderba 1y ago
    100% agreed. Globalization pushes cities away from being centers of local culture and introduces the blandness of mass cultural homogenization. More countries need to take a tip from Bermuda. https://www.bermuda4u.com/faqs/mcdonalds-bermuda/ https://www.bermuda4u.com/faqs/mcdonalds-bermuda/
    • corimaith 1y ago
      The strongest cultural exporters are those that wholly embraced globalization but also engaged and built further on the ideas. China's cultural rise is precisely because they built on prior Japanese and American ideas. So it's not bland, because what is the weight of a single culture to the combined contributions of a dozen. And through that, possibility is created, resulting in a far greater range of diversity than the traditions stuck in the past.
  • corimaith 1y ago
    Given that I do see alot of Starbucks in China and in many countries, I'm inclined to think a larger portion isn't so petty and do like having the option of Western products/lifestyle.
• NoboruWataya 1y ago
  I think they still need us to buy their stuff, though maybe less so than in the past. Many of the points the article is making are basically that they don't need to buy our stuff, but hasn't that always been the case? With a massive population and manufacturing base, and significant linguistic and technical barriers between them and the West, it's hardly surprising that they would build their own Google rather than importing ours. I don't think of China as producing cheap crap, I think of it as producing everything. A lot of that stuff is cheap crap, I know because I bought it. But clearly they also produce high tech and high value goods. I also don't think it's surprising or new that an authoritarian country can deliver material progress for its people. I think the same was true for the early Soviet Union and the fascist countries of 20th century Europe. Democracy's main selling point was never that it made us rich.
  • t-3 1y ago
    > Democracy's main selling point was never that it made us rich. I don't know how old the capitalism/democracy conflation is, but it's definitely more than a few decades. The political and economic systems are inextricably linked in the minds of many.
• 4dregress 1y ago
  How does this slop even get on the front page?
• keiferski 1y ago
  China has built its own enormous internal market—its own tourism, its own brands, its own everything. They've turned inward not from isolation but from self-sufficiency. Not sure how the title matches with this line at all. In any case, these kinds of analyses always seem really shallow and historically ignorant to me. I can totally buy the idea that China will become a dominant economic player in the world, if it isn't already. This seems like an obvious, borderline mundane observation to make. What would be more insightful is an analysis of China and the West that factors in three big things: 1. How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on. No matter how much China outcompetes America, I don't think it will ever be in that sort of situation. The military and national security state, plus the sheer amount of personal firearms, pretty much guarantees IMO that the US is basically impregnable from outside military interventions. 19th century China had neither of these things. And so I think you're inevitably going to have, at worst, a multipolar world, if not a directly bipolar one. 2. More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place. And more importantly, if those cultural trends are still active, even if they are somehow dormant. If you don't factor these in, your picture of history is extremely short-term and basically dependent on contemporary predictions of the future. (See: predictions of Japan in the 1980s.) 3. And more recently, how the "enemy" of the Soviet Union prompted the US to behave more competitively and feel pressured to perform. See, for example, the Space Race. I don't really get the sense that China is anywhere near occupying the same place in the American imagination right now, and so there isn't much of a competitive spirit. There seem to be rumblings of one developing in the last decade, but it's still not quite there. If it ever develops, certainly it's going to be a factor.
  • seanicus 1y ago
    It's hard to imagine what could even constitute a modern Sputnik moment, but it's an interesting thought experiment. I just don't think that Americans care enough, and both countries are way more dependent on each other than the US and USSR ever were. Caveat I've been wrong on pretty much every political prognostication I've ever made, so buy some defense industry stocks. Maybe US gets really good at maglev trains and in reprisal China goes full throttle on inventing teleportation/hyperdrive tech?
• delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
  > Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism with good PR. The author got one city in this list backward. China copied Singapore, through and through. Deng Xiaoping's state visit to Singapore was the catalyst and model for China's subsequent opening up and 'state capitalism'[1][2][3], where the party in power would have leverage and possibly ownership over both state- and privately-owned enterprises. Singapore calls them 'GLCs', or government-linked companies, and they form the overwhelming majority of its GDP. [1]: https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=6c7cb559-4228-4043-81f7-dfb084e10c78#11 https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=6c7cb559-... [2]: https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/straitstimes19940520-1.2.35.13 https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/s... [3]: https://thediplomat.com/2023/12/looking-back-on-deng-xiaopings-landmark-visit-to-singapore/ https://thediplomat.com/2023/12/looking-back-on-deng-xiaopin...
  • cholantesh 1y ago
    Quite frankly, suggesting that the Gulf states are only now, thanks to the Chinese coming around to "authoritarian capitalism" and the importance of "good PR" seems a bit rich.
• casey2 1y ago
  >China went from burning coal directly to becoming the world's solar panel factory. You're phrasing make it sound like they aren't the largest coal consumer in the world. If they managed to genuinely leapfrog the west their manufacturing industry would be mostly electric. They are using the same unsustainable tech as the rest of us. The same global pressures that affect every country will hollow out their supply and talent pyramids and there is no way around that short of just saying NO to slave labor
• delusional 1y ago
  > The government we call authoritarian is delivering what Western democracies struggle to: stuff that actually works. Their infrastructure works. Extreme poverty collapsed. Life expectancy increased by 10 years. They can plan 20 years ahead while Western politicians can't plan past the next election. This is such an America centric point of view. Plenty of central Europe is delivering longer life expectancy and better public infrastructure, without the authoritarian state (at least if you ask anybody but an American).
  • chrisco255 1y ago
    I mean both of these points are moot. China's life expectancy boosts are just the effect of coming out of poverty. Meanwhile plenty of European countries have seen declines in life expectancy in recent years: Austria and Finland: Largest declines (-0.4 years each). Estonia and the Netherlands: -0.2 years. Germany, Italy, and Latvia: -0.1 years
  • erxam 1y ago
    Europe only developed this way because of the immense ideological and moral pull the Soviet Union had over the populace. Capital and the ruling classes feared revolutionary intent so much that they had no other choice than to give in and give people a good quality of life to try and stymie it. It's the Otto von Bismarck state welfare tactic. Now that it's gone and revolutionary ideas have basically all but completely disappeared (China does not and probably will never have the same standing the Soviets did), they don't have to keep the façade up anymore. This is why everything has been decaying. Sooner or later all the 'advantages' and 'benefits' Europe has will wither away into nothingness.
• wahern 1y ago
  > Walking through the ancient towns another reality hit me: China doesn't need us anymore. These towns were packed with only Chinese tourists, I counted maybe ten Westerners the whole week. No Starbucks, no McDonald's, no Western chains at all. What? New Orlean's French Quarter doesn't have McDonalds or Starbucks, either. And how is it shocking that a historical district in a province not internationally well known would have mostly domestic tourists? > China has built its own enormous internal market—its own tourism, its own brands, its own everything. They've turned inward not from isolation but from self-sufficiency. Is this person completely ignorant about Chinese history? Precisely nothing has changed about China, the culture has always been like this, if only because they've always been so large. There's a reason they've always called themselves the Middle Kingdom (i.e. the center of the universe). Large countries are like this, generally. The USA is like this. Perhaps the author is American and that's why they're so shocked when they begin to see the world through others' eyes.
  • zknow 1y ago
    I don't think many people realize what a historical aberation 20th century China was.
    • wahern 1y ago
      I'm not even sure the 20th century was an aberration. Yes, the 19th and 20th centuries saw outside influences (Opium Wars, WWII, Communism) triggering massive domestic changes, but those influences happened at the edges, geographically and figuratively. What was visible from the perspective of the average Chinese person was always, wholly Chinese. I think the anti-colonial movement, like the social justice movement, gives a false impression to people about what it's like to be an "other". These movements bifurcate groups into oppressors and oppressed, and explicitly or implicitly the oppressed are cast as victims beholden to a world in which they have no agency, perennially always outside looking in. They're less than human; their humanity stripped in exchange for being cast as objects of virtue. It turns people into caricatures, so when you see "oppressed" people behaving normally--the same way "normal" people do, e.g. your local community--it can be shocking.
  • 1y ago
• PedroBatista 1y ago
  While I don't deny China is a big economy with areas where it's leading. This article reads a bit like cheerleading, which is fine. It's just not the whole truth. Also: >prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties. So did the USSR in many places.
  • logicchains 1y ago
    The article is misleading. What matters when comparing economic systems is relative standards of living _per person_, and America's GDP per capita of around $60k is 4x larger than China's GDP per capita of around $15k. The reason China's total GDP is high is because the population is so high, over a billion people. That's something the Chinese government deserves zero credit for because without the one child policy the population would be even higher; the Chinese government actively tried to suppress population growth. As another point of reference, Taiwan's GDP per capita is around $34k. I.e. if you look past the propaganda, in empirical terms the average Taiwanese person's material quality of life is twice as good as the average mainlander's.
  • mewse-hn 1y ago
    It didn't feel like cheerleading to me, the very section you quoted is pointing out the part that is most troubling about China's rise, that they seem to be doing it without western freedoms. This is contrary to the ideology of the cold war that the market economy of the West won because of western liberties - freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, free elections. China's incredible transformation is happening without those things.
    • logicchains 1y ago
      >China's incredible transformation There's nothing incredible about a GDP per capita of $15k, less than half the GDP of Korea, Japan or Taiwan. Slightly less even than places like Romania and Turkey. The only thing impressive about it that China's population is so large that the absolute GDP can be high even when the GDP per person is low. But the purpose of a government/economic system is to improve the standard of living of its citizens, and by that metric China is far behind other East Asian nations.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• sys32768 1y ago
  Now the author should write an article criticizing China while visiting there.
• porphyra 1y ago
  Once Deng Xiaoping did his reforms and opening up, it removed much of the impediments that Mao's CCP caused, and China was able to develop super fast. But recently I am a little concerned that Xi Jinping's rule is a bit of a return to some Mao-style authoritarian principles that are likely to hamper growth. * Economic growth slowed down significantly under Xi Jinping compared to his predecessor Hu Jintao. Also, while Xi handled the start of the Covid pandemic well, he sort of fumbled the recovery afterwards with too heavy-handed quarantine/daily testing policies. * China has demonstrated that it's super good at AI stuff, publishing lots of papers, having extremely talented engineers at Deepseek, etc, but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity. * China continues to have a brain drain of talented scientists and engineers to the US and other parts of the world. A large proportion of the top talent at Google, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, etc, are Chinese-American. * From my anecdotal experience, many young people in China feel helpless and unmotivated due to the hyper-competitive environment and lack of opportunities. It is common to find healthy young adults who would rather "lie flat" than work. Together with an extremely aging population due to the one-child policy, this does not bode well for the future. Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall. In the age of information it is lame that information flow in and out of the country is so restricted. On one hand, as this article points out, the rest of the world is ignorant of the advances in China. On the other hand, the Chinese people are also ignorant of many things outside.
  • seanicus 1y ago
    That firewall isn't going away anytime soon. Americans are inundated with a deluge of foreign influence campaigns from a variety of foreign powers and no way China wants that pain revisited upon themselves.
    • yonisto 1y ago
      Sure. This why they block google search, amazon and onlyfans. LOL. The wall always had two functions, the obvious blocking from getting people in, but it also blocks from getting your people out
• yonran 1y ago
  > Singapore, Dubai, Rwanda—they're all copying the Chinese model: authoritarian capitalism I don’t know much about China, but I’m not sure the Chinese model of economic modernization today is much different than post-war US model that worked of defense-led capitalism, strategic resource stockpiles to maintain price stability, and strong antitrust. I think the Chinese economy is probably more free-market (in the sense that it is easier to start a business, and the Econ 101 model of pure competition that drives down prices applies to more markets) than the US is today.
• jackero 1y ago
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• magicmicah85 1y ago
  I don't know much, so feel free to tell me if I'm wrong but a quick rebuttal of this article would point out how half of china's cities are sinking, their debt to GDP ratio was 300% before a GDP revision and they ignore international patents and intellectual property. I'm happy that China lifted their people out of poverty, though. Their achievements are certainly real. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68844731 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68844731 https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/02/the-relationship-between-chinese-debt-and-chinas-trade-surplus?lang=en https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/02/the-relationship... https://www.hudson.org/technology/china-ignores-rule-of-law-to-dominate-global-telecommunications https://www.hudson.org/technology/china-ignores-rule-of-law-...
  • ronsor 1y ago
    > ignore international patents and intellectual property I'm no CCP shill, but I wish we'd do that too.
    • magicmicah85 1y ago
      We'd be playing by the same rules in that case. And there are some companies that ignore that already. No AI company, to my knowledge, was built on ethically sourced material.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    • dheera 1y ago
      Also, ignore international laws about the internet. No China website spews stupid GDPR popups. They don't listen to the EU, even if they have EU users. I don't think the US should, either. I don't disagree with privacy laws, but GDPR popups isn't it, and the US should grow its own. Don't set precedents that other countries can just make up laws and you'll just blindly follow them outside their jurisdiction.
      • 1y ago
• rado 1y ago
  Been there a few times. I see the skepticism in the comments and would suggest to just visit and see for yourself. Of course it won’t be the full picture but just check it out. It’s perfectly safe, and now easier than ever.
• scythe 1y ago
  >Transportation? California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. canceled HS2’s northern leg after years of overruns. Berlin’s new airport opened almost a decade late and billions over budget. Meanwhile, China built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h. I know this is a tangent but I really think it's completely asinine that we hold passenger rail and particularly high-speed rail to the same standards (environmental, eminent domain, etc) as other projects — public and private — in light of the fundamental differences: - RoW for trains is highly constrained. Turns and hills are both very bad. A factory can be moved. A road can turn. A train is SOL. - Passenger rail displaces transport modes that have far worse externalities for the environment, human safety and land use. Other infrastructure generally does not do this. There are a few exceptions like powerlines. - Failing transport networks are a national embarrassment. If we have to do this — if we're committed to Cold War Two — then can't we at least win? It's not just China that built more miles of passenger rail than the United States in the past two decades. It's also Mexico. Something is wrong.
• Liftyee 1y ago
  I have a cognitive dissonance between valuing freedom and privacy and China's level of development (because of/in spite of limited freedom). My hopes for China fall into 2 main camps: - Measured increases in personal freedom. Restricting information serves to slow the viral spread of minority/non-mainstream opinions (i.e. limiting the reach of a vocal minority), but keeping the population from being exposed to "bad" information is only beneficial as long as the government is "good". - Acknowledge/continue working on current issues (demographic issues, housing market, domestic consumption). The worst that can happen to a country is that they trick themselves with their own lies (a common trope in many films featuring non-Western countries). Interested in hearing thoughts/rebuttals/additions on this. Disclaimer: I am ethnically Chinese but grew up outside the country.
  • threatofrain 1y ago
    I feel like democratic nations have a similar issue in that information players often have a big advantage and ordinary people have no chance in getting a correct story. Personally I feel overwhelmed with how much a person has to keep up with just to cast a few votes correctly every now and them. At the very least, democracy is a comprehensive strategy and multiple policies must in place simultaneously to approach the leading cases of success that we see in current times, such as decades of great education.
    • tuatoru 1y ago
      Democracy isn't really about the people having a say. Especially not having to be correct. That's window dressing on the core advantage, which is regime change without bloodshed. Under other systems of government, prominent supporters of the old regime generally lost their lives or were exiled. Regime change without bloodshed changes the incentives for rulers enough that it's worth them building anad preserving things rather than just extracting as much as possible for themselves and their families and supporters. There's the chance they can come back.
      • threatofrain 1y ago
        I'm not really sure that regime change in China will mean bloodshed either, TBH. Of course we shall see how this prediction unfolds when Xi Jingping is succeeded.
• rchaud 1y ago
  > A solar panel bench with wireless charging in a random small town in Yunnan anyone? Did anyone else see the picture and immediately think that this design wouldn't be possible in the west because it didn't have any anti-homeless barriers on it?
  • tiahura 1y ago
    The counter-culture movement had tremendous success in eliminating the basic forces regulating antisocial behavior.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • imp0cat 1y ago
    The author of this article seem to be fixated on China too much. These benches are quite common in southern Europe (Croatia). https://total-croatia-news.com/news/made-in-croatia/more-croatian-youth-innovation-a-smart-bench-phone-charger-from-ivan-mrvos/ https://total-croatia-news.com/news/made-in-croatia/more-cro...
• kelseyfrog 1y ago
  If China is more successful then we're rubes. Every time an article like this hits, the Western brain spasms. But…but they don’t innovate, they just copy! But…but ghost cities, Evergrande, debt spiral. Any day now it all collapses! But…but how do they even freedom? We can't believe China is eating the world because it would mean Western Civilization is contingent - that everything leading up to this point wasn't an inevitability. That we actually had a choice and got tricked into strip malls, failed governance, and life long debt. That wealth inequality wasn't actually our destiny and the people who got rich off what we built didn't actually deserve it. So we have to believe that people may ride those trains and pay with those QR codes, but deep down, their souls are yearning for suburban strip malls, CNN panel discussions, and 30-year mortgages. China has to be perpetually both failing and knocking at our doorstep because the idea that then we’re left with the intolerable truth: they actually built things that work, and we chose not to.
  • hn_throw_250828 1y ago
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• password54321 1y ago
  Prediction: China is going to get the same treatment as Japan currently is in the future for tourism. It is going through its stages of racism in the West that Japan went through (along with many other countries) where ordinary people still think it is just a smog filled industrial dump but in the future it will probably start getting a further influx of Western tourists like Japan did. Japan wasn't even on many people's radar until social media because the West likes to pretend East Asia doesn't exist unless it serves their narrative.
  • chrisco255 1y ago
    > Japan wasn't even on many people's radar until social media because the West likes to pretend the East Asia doesn't exist unless it serves their narrative. You're joking right? Like Japan has been a central part of American culture since at least the 80s. I grew up on Nintendo, Mario is more famous than Mickey Mouse at this point. Everyone had Sony Walkmans long before social media came out. Toyota and Honda won the passenger car market many decades ago. There's always in my lifetime been a huge constituency of Japan fans in the U.S., praising everything from anime to sushi to video games to Tokyo markets. Japan is getting a huge influx of tourism from the west right now because their economy has been on a 3 decade slog after rapid growth from the 50s through the 90s. Their population is in decline and their currency has gotten very weak. Thus, it's cheaper for westerners to visit than it has been in the past.
    • password54321 1y ago
      Just look at tourism numbers. In the space of decade the numbers over doubled for the US alone within the 2010s. What's more plausible, the Yen or social media advertisement? You are also talking about Nintendo/Pop-culture I am talking about tourism for the masses. Respecting people and their culture versus enjoying instant ramen are not the same thing.
      • triceratops 1y ago
        High tourist numbers = respecting people and their culture? Flying abroad for vacations has gotten cheaper and more popular over the decades. That's the only reason.
• chrisco255 1y ago
  This essay is far too swooning to take seriously. Mobile payments vs credit card payments aren't a revolution. America has Google and Apple Pay but most Americans still swipe. It's just not that different and it's easier to compartmentalize your spending that way. The idea of an "everything app" like WeChat actually turns me completely off. I don't want everything in one app. I want compartmentalization. I value it, in fact. > The West spent 150 years building coal plants, then natural gas, then slowly adding renewables. China went from burning coal directly to becoming the world's solar panel factory. They make 80% of all solar panels globally. China is also, incidentally the coal king of the world, and has rapidly expanded coal production over the last few decades. Their coal consumption has tripled since 2000. For all the breathless commentary on solar the author spares no ink on China's appetite for coal. The reason people still claim China is a developing country is so that they get a pass on arbitrary restrictions imposed on "developed" Western nations who like to pay lip service to climate change concerns and don't mind the gradual decline that comes along with this antigrowth mindset. Meanwhile the world has outsourced production to China, where coal makes up a majority of the electricity generated. Your country is getting leapfrogged by a competitor who doesn't play by your rules, but at least you can virtue signal to your elite friends while it happens. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China While California can't build anything these days, I would not hold their dysfunction to the rest of the Union. Florida built high speed rail between West Palm Beach and Orlando in just 4 years, and the route extends to Miami. Tesla built Giga Texas, the second largest building in the world by volume, in 14 months. American tech is also in the lead in self driving navigation. > China skipped the strip mall phase entirely. They went straight from street markets to super-apps that livestream shopping, where one influencer can sell $15 million worth of lipstick in five minutes China was never going to have strip malls. Strip malls are a feature of suburban life. China does not have the same geography nor the same decentralized population distribution as the U.S. has. As for livestream shopping, spare me. Americans don't shop via livestream because we're not entertained by the idea of being pitched crap we don't need. It's not novel to us either, we had the QVC network going back to the 80s. When I buy something, I search, click add to cart, and then checkout. > We’re going to solve climate change with a lot of Chinese technology—or we’re not going to solve it at all. If you buy the idea that we're going to solve for climate change with Chinese tech while China continues to pollute more than ever, I don't know what to tell you. China's "tech" in this case isn't their tech. Japan has produced more of the IP surrounding solar panels than anyone else, followed by the U.S.
• dcre 1y ago
  I need to find the quote, but historian and political commentary Adam Tooze suggested a few months ago that China's global economic and political dominance in this century could be so total that future historians will come to think of the entire modern history of Europe and the US as a mere setup for China becoming what it is. I find myself thinking about this almost every day.
  • wing-_-nuts 1y ago
    >China's global economic and political dominance in this century could be so total that future historians will come to think of the entire modern history of Europe and the US as a mere setup for China becoming what it is That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt. Say what you will about capital markets, but they do tend to deliver things that are actually desired and economically valuable given the right pricing incentives. I've long argued that we should replace our income tax with a progressive but heavy carbon tax. This would be far more effective than federal greenhouse gas regs and incentive programs. Unfortunately they're politically dead on arrival because they would tax the rich, powerful and politically connected far more than your average joe.
    • kamikazeturtles 1y ago
      > That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt. “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War I don't believe any of the stats coming out of China. I think it is best to approach data coming out of adversarial countries with lots of paranoia.
      • kilroy123 1y ago
        What? Demographics are collapsing all across the globe. If anything, they have consistently under-reported how bad it is.
      • thombee 1y ago
• alessandru 1y ago
  drivel. yunnan is rural historic farm area, next to tibet, it's not supposed to have mcdo. did author cry he couldn't get shake shack in tibet? Are they leading in solar panels? wow ... almost like cheap labor and non-existent pollution control makes manufacturing real cheap. Did you hear they're also mining and burning more coal than ever, despite the west's alleged 150 year advantage. But let's forget that. we can totally trust china to remove coal by 2030 like promised. we call china "emerging" because most (numbers, not the average) of its people make less than 10k per year. most of its rich people aren't investing in stocks or bonds. the government still needs to direct investment in large swaths of society, that is why china earns its "developing" label. do you think china's courts are developed? we call them emerging or developing, because they haven't shown to be independent yet and they issue political rulings like in some ... developing ... banana republic. that's why it's called developing. their institutions aren't particularly ... instituted. misleading calling china leader in heat pumps ... yes cheap heat pumps. good for them. but volume doesn't mean good, everyone likes cheap stuff. china makes 5 year government plans public, what is this 20 year plan he talks about? what is the success rate of these public plans? remember, they promised to control coal and reduce usage by 2030. small countries like singapore becoming more authoritarian by copying chinese politics isn't the bragging win you think it is.
• stickfigure 1y ago
  I think the wrong lesson is being taken here. China, like Russia, started from an incredibly low baseline - largely caused by authoritarian power. A new authoritarian power revitalized the economy and genuinely improved people's lives. People are generally grateful, and they have reason to be. The fast pace of economic growth didn't necessarily come from authoritarianism (though I'll accept it helped in some ways) but from the fast catch-up. That isn't going to last forever. Growth will slow - it's slowing already. And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on. My thesis is something like "any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm seas". The government of China's hard times are ahead of it. It's too early to write an epitaph for democracy.
  • yubblegum 1y ago
    > A new authoritarian power revitalized the economy Fantasy history there. No, the actual timeline: USA determined that USSR-CPC split and animosity were real and should be exploited. China, a social and economic basketcase, also saw the benefit of pivoting to the West. Then (fortuitously for the Chinese ..) Mao died and Deng Xiaping came to power and then to the US and wore a cowboy hat! Western Capitalists* , whether due to their cupidity (or stupidity), convinced themselves that massive investment, funds, and technology transfer to Communist China would somehow engender a "liberal China" in a generation. Even after CPC crushed the "liberal" front in its cadre in 1989, which should have been a wakeup call to the idiot class that rules the West, we had 8 years of Slick Willy letting China get their hands on all sorts of tech and secret in US and the West. And now, the Orange Clown is finishing "the job" by laying waste to US aliances and institutions, making sure 21st is irrevocably the Chinese Century. So that, hn, is how China actually got to "eat the world". https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/1kp4mxw/deng_xiaoping_wearing_a_cowboy_hat_during_a_visit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryPorn/comments/1kp4mxw/deng_x... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... *: No that ain't you and that certainty ain't me and it's not even the fabled "10%". Try the 0.1%.
    • kiba 1y ago
• twilo 1y ago
  China still burns more coal than anyone else by the way
  • triceratops 1y ago
    It has the second most number of people and next to no natural gas. What do you expect? And why is it relevant?
  • thombee 1y ago
    They're still leading the green revolution. You're criticising on of the countries doing the most for climate change because they aren't perfect. Seems might unfair
• tananaev 1y ago
  Authoritarian rule can work until it doesn't. It can even work better than democracy for some time because decisions can be made quickly. The problem that when it doesn't, there's no path for self-correction.
  • kamikazeturtles 1y ago
    Do we have a democracy though? If so many politicians are bought by special interests, does our system of governance allow for any path for self-correction?
  • tokioyoyo 1y ago
    I’m all for democracy, but we need to find a way for long-term commitments for nation building. If every head of state will wipe out 4-5 years of previous leadership’s work, you really can’t go far in today’s world.
    • krapp 1y ago
      That isn't a problem with every head of state, it only seems to be a problem with the US where social cohesion and national identity no longer exist, and partisan politics overrides everything. Other democracies don't have the all-powerful executive the US does, nor the innate hate and fear of effective government that the US was founded on, leading to a government designed to maximize friction and gridlock. The US is dragged down by an archaic political system designed for a pre-industrial society of slavers that immediately devolved into a two-party binary of entrenched elites - a system the US doesn't even spread when it does nation building because it's so fundamentally broken. So yeah, the solution here is just don't be like the US.
      • tokioyoyo 1y ago
        Where isn’t it a problem? Even here in Japan, a rising opposing party is campaigning on reverse-LDP, and gaining support. Same everywhere in Europe.
        • 1y ago
• Leary 1y ago
  No way. I read Noah Smith (number 1 economist on substack) every week and he says one must measure China in per capita terms for all the good stuff: GDP (preferably nominal), and in aggregate terms for all the bad stuff (pollution, carbon dioxide emissions). Also, it's logically impossible for China to be good. I have found a mathematical proof: 1: Democracy is good 2: China is not a democracy Therefore, obviously China is not good.
  • layman51 1y ago
    You did a logical fallacy which is called “denying the antecedent.” From your first two propositions, it doesn’t follow that anything that isn’t a democracy isn’t good.
• pessimizer 1y ago
  China is run by engineers, and the "West" by dimwitted amoral lawyers.
  • chrisco255 1y ago
    Our government doesn't run our economy. The private sector dwarfs the public sector.
    • baggy_trough 1y ago
      Over 1/3 is quite a bit. In a sense, we are 1/3 socialist already, and that's just in direct spending, not including the mountain of red tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending_in_the_Uni...
      • chrisco255 1y ago
        It's a fair amount but no not all government spending is automatically "socialist" or even socialistic. Government and socialism are two different things.
• trextrex 1y ago
  I don't understand this single dimensional view of the world where one country has to be the "winner" or "best". Historically that has almost never been the case except for military might, which wasn't necessarily correlated with technological advancement. Economic size does matter, but that's eventually going to track population size. Why can't we have a multi polar world where different countries are good at different things, and no one has to dominate?
  • bgnn 1y ago
    Because at the international stage there's no rule. It's pure anarchy. This is why the countries with big military might and and economy to back it can bully the other countries into submission, or bribe them into submission (post-WW2 US and USSR did both). With this they can boost their economy, and with that their military so there's a superpower born. This is super stupid of course. What you describe requires rationality and humility. So far not happening.
  • runlaszlorun 1y ago
    Agreed. And don't get me started on the whole Thucydides Trap, whose primary trap is that assuming war is inevitable based on conflicts from centuries ago will, in fact, become a stupidly self-fulfilling prophecy.
  • AuthAuth 1y ago
    Its not about dominating its the constant competition. Growth and power makes it easier to grow more and become more powerful. If you stay in your lane you limit how you can grow and then the guy who didnt stay in their lane has grown bigger and can now influence and push you around. You could have an equal balance of power but both sides would still be competing to match each other and it could be upset at any moment.
• m0llusk 1y ago
  The high speed rail comparison is a good example of how this view is as flawed as the idea that China makes cheap crap. China spent around a trillion dollars worth of conjured financial assets on their high speed rail network. The result has some very positive qualities but also ongoing cost overruns, many incidents including quite a few deaths, and spotty service on routes that turned out to have inconsistent demand. Now the bills are coming due, revenues are way down, the country is in a large downturn, and the future is cloudy. We will see how things play out, but the idea that China has a great rail network only really stands if you ignore all the issues with debt, maintenance, and disappointing utilization.
  • danny_codes 1y ago
    If china went with cars like the US did instead of rail they’d have 10s of thousands of excess deaths a year.
  • thombee 1y ago
    Does public transport, which acts to serve the public, NEED to generate revenue? Of course its good if they do, but don't see it as a prerequisite. Idk about you, but I would rather have an excess of underutilised rail then the 0km of high speed rail that is in my country.
• sharpshadow 1y ago
  No mentions yet that China is ruled by a communist party inspired by the Russian Revolution. Russia and China opened their market but remained in socialism. The key takeaway I would say is that their primary interest is making their country great whereas in the West it’s private families lineages which want to control as much as possible globally sacrificing whatever it takes even whole countries for their interests. The war on corruption in China[0] is noteworthy where by 2023 “2.3 million government officials have been prosecuted”. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_under_Xi_Jinping https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_und...
• neonrider 1y ago
  > But China proved you can pair authoritarian politics with a market economy. It offers a bargain we thought impossible: prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties. And for the billions of people who remember being hungry, who want their kids to have better lives, who care more about rising wages than free speech—it's getting harder to argue they're wrong. Author sounds like someone on their way from a week-end in the Huxleyan London of Brave New World. Everything was so beautiful. Freedom? Fuck that.
• torginus 1y ago
  This reads like an exercise in how many pro-West and anti-China cliches can we fit into an article.
• Buttons840 1y ago
  I know I have politics brain, but I have to turn things to socioeconomic politics: If we're going to compete with a free market against China's hybrid-communism, then we should do things that enable the strengths of a free market to be realized. If our free market is a Magic The Gathering deck, it's like we're a blue deck that refuses to put any blue mana into the deck. Our deck isn't losing because it has bad ideas, it's because we weren't willing to put any of the supporting cards into play. Patents are mostly used by large companies to protect themselves against smaller companies that could be more efficient. We choose to use patents in a way that stifles new competition. We refuse to put the "efficient new competitor" card in our deck. Intellectual property lasts for--what?--150 years these days. Ridiculous. What about labor vs capital? Income is taxed more than capital gains. This is not based on economic theory or anything, this is just a decision we've made. We have chosen to value moving money and capital around more than working and building things. What about the "free" in free market? Do we make it easy for laborers to move around freely? Nope. We have weak social safety nets. Healthcare is tied to employment as though those who are not working a traditional job deserve to die. We allow Jimmy John's to include non-complete clauses to prevent their workers from making sandwiches for a company that pays more. We also allow a form of indentured servitude via "TRAPs"[0] which prevent workers from moving freely in the market. We're trying to compete as a free market without allowing most of the things that make free markets effective because they would be inconvenient for those who already have wealth and power. When the private data of millions of people is leaked twice a month, nobody cares--or rather, nobody with power to do something about it cares. When giant companies fail because they made bad decisions, we bail them out, thus eliminating the opportunity for new and smarter companies to grow. Our law making system seems completely unable to change any of these things and has devolved into one man making unpredictable threats and orders that are probably illegal and unenforceable, but most just follow them anyways. What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening? [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905728
• elric 1y ago
  The final paragraphs were the more interesting ones IMO. Especially the closing sentence: > The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures. This one hits close to home. I saw an improvement in quality of life between the 90s and maybe 2005, but not so much since then. Not to say that there hasn't been progress, I mean tablets and pervasive internet & smartphone usage was unthinkable back then. But my life isn't any better for them. Cities feel worse, more congested, less money for public transport, more littering. Nature is disappearing all around me. Energy is WAY more expensive. Food quality is worse. Pollution seems worse. Hell, people seem worse, somehow? Maybe this is all the disenchantment of middle age (or slumbering depression). But I haven't seen any political projects that fill me with joy in a very long time. Only dread. From shitty "free" trade agreements to Chat Control. Pouring more concrete and reducing train services. Endless austerity because we can no longer afford healthcare and/or pensions. Yet at the same time, economic growth has mostly kept going, but it isn't translating to improved quality of life for Average Joe.
  • antifa 1y ago
    2010 is the year I personally go with. I could be too young to realize it actually started in 2005. Either way, "no longer trying" is how I would describe the US leadership over the last 2 (or more!) decades.
    • jay_kyburz 1y ago
      It was the point where people stopped listening to people who know what they are talking about, and instead to other idiots on social media, and "news" that was given a strong slant to appeal to a particular audience. Democracy can't work when people don't have a functioning 4th estate.
      • freilanzer 1y ago
        "My ignorance and stupidity is just as good as your logic and facts!"
  • Herring 1y ago
• jameslk 1y ago
  > We were told that democracy and development go together. That free markets require free politics. That our system was the "end of history." People and development go together. The more people you have, the more development you can have. India is experiencing a similar early growth trajectory (from a GDP and energy use perspective), because like China, they have over a billion people. Comparatively, the US for example, has a few hundred million people. Historically, this has always been the case. China and India were the most populated places and biggest economies for much of the past several millennia What held China and India back the past few centuries? The west, through its Opium wars and colonialism. Globalization accelerated a reversion to the mean The takeaway here shouldn't be to end democracy and turn to state capitalism or mercantilism. For the US to keep up, it will need more people. Or AGI I guess
  • tokioyoyo 1y ago
    It can have the same trajectory, but no city in India can match an average T3 city in China in terms of QoL. Some countries, I think, are just doing better at utilizing their resources and sheer number of people than others.
    • jameslk 1y ago
      QoL is one measure sure, but I'd consider it a lagging indicator. I look at GDP growth rate and energy usage to get a better idea of where things are headed https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42295 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42295
• stego-tech 1y ago
  Thumbing through the comments here really smacks of denial and desperation, like ideology somehow on its own will win out in the end. That the ideals of democracy, and free speech, and liberty will inevitably win out over authoritarianism just because, well, they will. What ideologues often forget is that their beliefs don’t pay rent. They don’t feed the hungry, they don’t create economic growth, they don’t solve problems. Yes, democracy is phenomenal and I think that direct democracy is the current peak governance model out there, but look at how easily Western Democracies have been captured by capital, how western economies lost the plot of the long game and failed to solve problems because they’re so myopically focused on next quarter growth at all costs and shareholder returns. We point our fingers at the abuse of the Uyghurs by China and prison labor, but conveniently ignore the migrants crossing the Mediterranean that our countries let drown, or the immigrants being kidnapped by governments, or the American prison industrial complex’s outsized impact on non-white communities, or NATO’s abuse of and complicity in the genocide of Muslims and Arabs. We crow about Chinese mass surveillance while feeding Meta, Google, Palantir, and the NSA with all our data. Which is to say, we actually aren’t that different. And when you begrudgingly swallow that uncomfortable truth, you begin to see how we’re objectively worse off now and in the near future than our Chinese peers. Our infrastructure crumbles because we allowed Capital to neglect it, while China’s whisks its citizenry around quickly and efficiently using EVs and HSR. Our employment markets are similar in struggles for the youth and the cost of living crisis, yet China at least acknowledges the issue and attempts to support its people while Western governments embrace austerity and blame labor for being robbed by Capital. Whilst Capital decries over-regulation as hindering its prosperity here, Chinese firms flourish under a far more strict regime because they understand politics is a fool’s errand for entities designed to make goods or provide services. I love what China has done, even if I’m disgusted with the horrors it has wrought on others to achieve it. Where I differ from others is that I’m not naive enough to believe we’re assured victory simply based on ideology, morals, or ethics alone, nor do I engage in the denialism so many worship when cheerleading anti-DEI, anti-science, and anti-labor talking points in a vain attempt to boost personal worth at the expense of others. This is the last real chance for Western governments to establish, at the very least, a balance with China in the century ahead. China still needs western R&D, western technologies, western patents, and western money, at least for the time being. Once they have a competitive navy? Once they’ve transitioned to renewables? Once they’ve closed their supply chains and can recycle their waste into new products? Once they’ve solved the hard problems Capital never can, because they’re not immediately profitable to do so? Then we’re cooked.
• bgnn 1y ago
  Most people don't realize but the biggest thing China has going on for it is the start-up scene in semiconductors. There's too much focus on the chip production in the news, but the industry ecosystem is much bigger than that. Especially chip design and design automation are stagnated fields in the West because of the limited talent pool and lack of investment. You guys here are used to all the VC money, but in HW development world the story is different. There's simply a lack of investors to put down 10s of millions with 5-10 years horizon. Couple this with lack of talent: there aren't enough EE graduates with necessary training, you get a bleak situation. So most if the industry relies on foreigners from developing countries: Iran, China, India, Bangladesh.. Now that those Chinese EEs have better prospects at home, most of them are returning back to China to start their own companies. Similar trend is happening in design automation tools. We have 3 monopolies in the West extracting 20-30 peecent of the revenue from the semicon companies. There are competitors showing up in China. They aren't on par yet but it's just SW, so it's a matter of time. Since there's competition their pricing is so much better too. Unfortunately we don't have access to these SW, but Chinese companies do.
  • runlaszlorun 1y ago
    Interesting point. Would you say the US chip sanctions have given even more incentive for China?
    • anonzzzies 1y ago
      They have been pushing for independence for a while now but sanctions and tarrifs will push it all to go faster. And it is a big mistake: the west has some type of misplaced arrogance that china wont catch up that fast because asml, nvidia etc but I would not be so sure. Like more said here: a disadvantage is authoritarian but thats also an advantage: Xi can just command everyone to go one way and 'defeat the west'. And seems he is doing exactly that.
    • bgnn 1y ago
      Yes. It's the best thing happened for the Chinese semiconductor ecosystem. All those Chinese phones, networking equipment etc can't risk using the suppliers in the West as it can be shut down with a decree. Now Huawei, Xiaomi etc are funding so many start-ups and they are buying their products even if it's slightly worse than the state-of-the-art. The next generation of chips are going to be state-of-the-art for sure as there's not much of a gap. Chinese companies used to open design offices in the West to keep connected to the talent here. In the last 6 months they're massively divesting. This means EEs in China will be valued even more. Add this to 80% of the research in the field happening in Chinese universities now (as opposed to less than 10% 20 years ago), they have everything nicely aligned.
• anigbrowl 1y ago
  This breaks our Western discourse. We were told that democracy and development go together. That free markets require free politics. That our system was the "end of history." Numerous people were at pains to point out how these assumptions were overbroad or outright wrong, but could not get a hearing. In the US, people are heavily propagandized from childhood to believe that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Most other countries don't do this. They have national pride, people will casually say their country is the best, but they mean it in the sense of it being their favorite, not as some objective fact. They don't do daily pledges of allegiance at schools or sing the national anthem at every single sports fixture. This is a recipe for cognitive dissonance. Now of course people debate things online, in the media, and in academia, but often ideas that go against the grain are just entertained as polite abstractions compared to the greatest-country-in-the-world 'reality'. You can see this very clearly in politics, where a lot of people in Congress just don't really understand of believe perspectives that don't align with this default, and that goes a long way toward explaining how we have so many political actors that are increasingly and often aggressively detached from reality. The United States would have become a superpower regardless of what political system it adopted. If you give a bunch of settlers with relatively advanced technology access to an entire continent that's geographically isolated and only thinly populated by indigenous people with simpler technology, and that continent is rich in natural resources, the settlers and their descendants are going to prosper. The US constituted itself as a republic out of pragmatism; even if the founders had wanted to establish an American monarchy, they couldn't very well have instituted one based on the divine right of kings while repudiating their existing remote monarch. The British empire, constituted on a very different basis, continued to prosper for another 150 years after the US detached itself. In both cases, the countries had overwhelming strategic advantages; isolation and unspoiled resources in the American case, technological and naval superiority in the British. The foundational ethos on which the polity is run and which holds the population together is important, of course, but any ethos will do as long as the population is willing to go along with it. I don't think China's current conditions are the product of communism especially - as many have pointed out, they have something more akin to state capitalism now. The authoritarian structures in Chinese society have roots going back ~2200 years, to when the state of Qin managed to establish imperial authority and a centralized state with a bureaucracy and national political infrastructure instead of a feudal system. That centralized state has mutated or broken down numerous times over the centuries but has always been re-established in some form or other because it provided more general advantage to the polity as well as its rulers. About 1500 years they instituted imperial examination systems, which recruited state officials through merit rather than ancestry or wealth. Modern China adopted communism partly to throw off the shackles of colonial powers; my shallow take is that coming under the partial control of western nations like Britain and Germany induced a sort of culture-shock paralysis, but being further subjugated by their upstart neighbors from Japan (which country's name is synonymous with shortness/weakness in the Chinese language) shook them out of it. Communists were able to combine nationalist sentiment with the long-standing disaffections of the peasantry and a solid grasp of insurgent military tactics, during a period when other great powers were distracted by warring with each other. Following WW2 they speedran the industrial revolution: while the human costs were atrocious, I'm not sure that they were actually worse than those in the west, just more concentrated in time. Now they've speedrun consumer and technological economic development and exploring their imperial/hegemonic opportunities, a process which will play out for another 1-2 centuries, if history is any guide: https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf said guide is a heuristic rather than a rule, of course; ancient Egyptian civilization is thought to have persisted for about 3000 years. You live in closer historical proximity to Cleopatra than she did to the first builders of pyramids. To wrap up, my basic point is that Chinese authoritarianism isn't a product of communism so much as a reconstruction of a centralized state that has served the country for millenia, about 8 times longer than American society has existed. Nor do I think it's 'eating the world'; rather, China is resuming its historical place as a hegemonic power and is merely eating America's lunch. This is understandably unsettling to American strategic thinkers, some of whom had fallen into the trap of believing their own hype about a unipolar world in recent decades, and others of whom viewed China's ascendancy in manichean terms due to communism rather than looking at it in systematic terms and considering as simply a continuation of long-running historical patterns accelerated by technological change.
• dhjhdskj 1y ago
  The author’s case leans on survivorship bias and correlation/causation fallacies. China is portrayed as proof that authoritarianism “works,” while the long list of failed or stagnant dictatorships (Soviet Union, fascist states, much of the post-colonial world) is ignored. Success is attributed to repressive and uninclusive government sytems rather than to the far more decisive factors: market reforms, foreign capital, and global trade integration. By collapsing this complexity into a single flattering story about centralized control, the piece functions more as an ideology and propaganda piece than a real good faith analysis of China's root causes of success. The narrative also erases China’s structural advantages: the world’s largest labor force and vast natural resources that made global dominance in manufacturing and supply chains possible. These advantages would likely have delivered major growth under democracy, and possibly with less fragility, failure, and human rights abuse. By crediting authoritarianism instead, the article smuggles in a propagandistic message: authoritarian control isn’t incidental but necessary for technological and societal success. Bullshit!
  • int_19h 1y ago
    Author is specifically saying that authoritarian capitalism can be made to work.
• ciconia 1y ago
  > This worries me. I greatly value Western ideals—freedom of speech, democracy, individual rights. These things matter. Hmm I don't know about those so called "western values" - seems to me there's a lot of hypocrisy in western nations, where we look down on so called authoritarian societies as wrong or even evil. As TFA says, it looks like the Chinese government is delivering for its people, while it's clear that western democracies are not.
• kurtis_reed 1y ago
  What's the "eating" part though?
• esbranson 1y ago
  Good? So they can give back to the world. They've destroyed countless Chinese in the process, but that's not our problem. Complaining about trains when cheap air travel is available to even the poor is peak academia. Complaining about semiconductors to several generations who grew up on the Internet and iPhone doubly so. Anyone who has China lust should move there, the same for anyone with a burning lust for communism, give up their Western citizenship, and put their ignorance—oops I mean foresightedness—to the test. In fact, it's too bad we can't deport people there (eg wannabe communists). For the rest of us, Google Street View (of China versus, say, anywhere else), Walmart, and a healthy understanding of the difference between real life and Substack should suffice.
  • thombee 1y ago
    You're very ideologically inflexible. Instead of engaging with other modes of development / forms of government, youre just telling them to leave your country. Why don't you open your mind a bit, and learn from the experiences of others
    • esbranson 1y ago
      > learn from the experiences of others They are wrong. Here they can be wrong and survive, there they cannot. By law. We learn what we can from the laogai ren/laogai fan (劳改犯). (Thought criminals, laogai being reeducation camps.) > ideologically inflexible Perhaps. At any given time, possibly, but over time I think I disagree with you.
• CrackerNews 1y ago
  Authoritarian vs democracy is too overly simplistic a framework, IMO. More rather it is Chinese Marxist-Leninist democratic centralism vs Western liberal representative republics. The Communist Party of China obtains and centralizes authority from the lower layers to the upper layers, but the Chinese leaves the implementation details of its five-year plans at the local level. The political incentive is to make your bosses and subordinates look good, so they don't lose the mandate to reign to another clique in the party. Of course there was the example of the USSR failing to succeed in the global stage, but the Chinese variant is working in interpreting Marxism and Leninism to the Chinese 21st century. Meanwhile, the Western model was based on prior enlightenment and humanist ideals before Marxist critique of 19th century capitalism. The idea was that an enlightened populace would be able to democratically elect representatives to best represent themselves and their interests as opposed to a king, but the West after capitalism is largely setup to reward international capitalist incentives over other national interests. However, the two worlds are interdependent on each other. It was the first world outsourcing its manufacturing to this second world that led to its current prosperity. The first world instead pursued services and financialization.
  • thombee 1y ago
    One of the only reasonable comments in this thread full of ignorance
• gp90 1y ago
  > The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures This one hits close to home. Case in point, many people on HN argue that having fewer goods and higher prices is part of being an developed country. I think it's deadly wrong. A hallmark of a modern industrialized society is to make once-expensive products accessible to the majority of the people, if not everyone. That's how we got electricity, got clean water, got food like butter (which only wealthy families could afford), got cars, got iphone, got all kinds of appliances, and got amazing infrastructure. And somehow now it's okay to accept that China can manufacture and build faster, and cheaper, and better?
• quantum_state 1y ago
  Democracy as an ideal is not what is being practiced here in the US, at least in the last twenty or so years. People hacked the supreme court, hacked the media to con the voters for vote, big money comes into the mix, etc., no wonder it is not working as it should be.
• alon_honig 1y ago
  And they still don't have clean tap water. Like anywhere. Even tier 1 cities. Outside of a few routes The high speed trains are less convient than airports (but due to subsidies much cheaper). Quality of construction is horrible and by local standards house prices are extremely high. Basic Healthcare is pretty good but many procedures (i.e. hospitalization) are out of reach for the majority of the population. White collar Fraud is rampant (my friend had his bank account frozen because his name sounds like someone else). Their top tier apps are often crashing (seriously Chinese people have all sorts of tricks to force reboot an app) and overall not up to western standards. China is great but it is still a middle income country like Thailand or Malaysia. It's sheer size means that there will be pockets of innovation in a sea of what is overall suboar by western standards. There is definitely things that the west can learn from china (like the value of hard work and getting things done) and some of their tech (like batteries ) is leading edge but we have to put things in perspective. Every civilization will have it's advantages and disadvantages. There is no superior system. For the west (especially Europe) we need to embrace change. That is something that the Chinese truly lead the world.
• evolighting 1y ago
  It's nothing about China, point out in that article, it is "China Doesn't Need Us Anymore." because, Some people in China they don't care what "THE WORLD" care, So, "THEY ARE ALIENS", that’s what this is all about.
• ornel 1y ago
  Indeed, "the West stopped imagining better futures". But authoritarian capitalism isn't the only alternative out there. Millions of indigenous people around the world are living in many "alternative" societies, many of them very functional and delivering happiness and prosperity. It may be wise to check them out
  • dissent 1y ago
    This sounds suspiciously like the "noble savage" myth perpetuated by imperialists during the colonial era. Guessing which context you intended your comment to be read in, I can't help but find that a little ironic.
• uyghursaviour 1y ago
  [dead]
• Nevermark 1y ago
  > We were told that democracy and development go together. That free markets require free politics. That our system was the "end of history." Only two parties (of practical importance), each with its power highly centralized (one perhaps more than the other), isn't actually very democratically friendly in terms of choice. Or policy idea evolution/recombination. And from a "democracy" PR perspective, it's not going so well either. A healthy democracy, where ideas and candidates have more sources and competition, would be much more likely to be development friendly/capable/consistent.
• grafmax 1y ago
  > But China proved you can pair authoritarian politics with a market economy. It offers a bargain we thought impossible: prosperity without freedom It seems like politicians in liberal democracies are giving up on democracy and turning to authoritarianism instead. But since 2008 it’s become clear to many people that these liberal democracies are actually governments owned by the upper class. It’s not that politicians are turning away from democracy. They are throwing the mask off. What they envy is the ability to exercise power without disguising it. That’s not going to cure our problems. It’s actually the narrow self-interested decisions of the upper class that have landed us in this state of decline.
• lmm 1y ago
  There's a big difference between surpassing the US and dominating the world. To the US, not being able to at least plausibly claim to be Top Nation is an threat to your core psychological identity; to most of us it's Tuesday. The downsides of Chinese authoritarianism are very real. I wouldn't want to live there. But the west is increasingly unable to deliver on things that are lower down on the hierarchy of needs. Crime and personal safety, infrastructure maintenance, homes within commuting distance of jobs. It's not so much that we need to dream bigger as that we need to stop sawing off our own legs with the basics. Plus when decades of "democracy" can't deliver things the majority wants - like reduced immigration - people will rightly ask what good it is to anyone.
  • tkel 1y ago
    Democracy is only in the political arena, in the US the economy is organized as dictatorships. So it's unsurprising that the economic results are not good for the majority of people. Because all businesses are organized as dictatorships, they are not controlled by the majority of people. Same way political dictatorships did not deliver what people wanted, they deliver what dictators want.
    • p3rls 1y ago
      has HN always been this bad
      • anonzzzies 1y ago
        when discussing politics, yes. read tech stuff instead.
• amai 1y ago
  The rich are eating the world. China just helps to increase the difference between poor and rich by offering slavery as a service.
• amai 1y ago
  Taiwan is the better China. It shows you can have a good economy, good infrastructure and a world class democracy at the same time. There is no need to make compromises on human rights to be successful economically.
  • mogreator 1y ago
    Until Taiwan become new HonKong and get reincorporated to China.
    • amai 1y ago
      Did Hongkong economy improve since it belongs to China? Not at all: https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2024/1/26/in-hong-kong-decades-of-wealth-gains-evaporate-on-beijings-watch https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2024/1/26/in-hong-kong... I think especially Hongkong shows how Chinas dictatorship is actually holding it's economy back. If China would be a free country they would rule the world since a long time ago. But thanks to the iron grip of the communist party China will never be able to reach its full potential.
      • maxglute 1y ago
        HK GDP grew by 7x since handover. It grew from 450B to 600B since HK crackdown. Reality is HK is portal to PRC wealth by PRC ascension, even pre handover. PRC decides how rich HK gets to be by deciding how much PRC economic activity HK gets to launder. Also TFW broken TW democracy is something to be emulated.
        • amai 1y ago
          According to your own numbers it grew by 150B which is 33% in 30 years and not 700% as you wrote. Please learn math before you write propaganda for Bejing.
          • maxglute 1y ago
            Per original comment: HK grew 700% since HANDOVER, 1997, i.e. 23 years. HK grew 33% since CRACKDOWN, 2019, i.e. 5 years. Please learn literacy and numeracy.
• user____name 1y ago
  Related: Barrington Moore Jr.: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Origins_of_Dictatorship_and_Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Origins_of_Dictatorship...